


Tumblr Grad School AU

by MoragMacPherson



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cigarettes, Graduate School, M/M, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Trivial Pursuit, bocce
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 07:46:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16868965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoragMacPherson/pseuds/MoragMacPherson
Summary: Luke and Bodhi are grad students, and graduate school is different.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Putting these up quickly in the light of the tumblr purge. Both date from spring 2017. Original prompts included at the top of the chapters. Un-beta'd and mostly unedited.
> 
> For @archival-hogwash‘s prompt: I could trouble you for a college/grad school AU for RogueJedi? I leave the specifics up to you, but it’d be great to see the before, during or after periods of one of those magically engaging conversations that seem to only happen in college, the ones that go from night to morning without either person realizing it… a meeting of the minds, if you will?

Luke stumbles out of the house party and into the backyard, just needing a few moments to himself. The air is pleasantly cool and the sky is positively full of stars; Luke stares up at them and laughs to himself, spinning in a circle to watch them blur. “How drunk are you?” calls out an amused voice in the dark.

Luke catches himself and turns towards the voice with a smile. “Not that drunk, they’re just really pretty. I like stars,” he says, walking towards the far corner of the voice where he finds an even prettier sight smirking at him with a cigarette in one hand and a jelly glass half full of clear liquid in the other. “You don’t like parties?” he asks.

The man shrugs, “I like parties just fine, but when my housemates found four different accordion players,” he says with a theatrical shudder.

Luke laughs as the faint strains of what sounds like a  _They Might Be Giants_ song cut through the din. “But that’s the best part, we never had these kind of things back during undergrad.”

The man holds up his arms expansively. “Welcome to Casa Roja,” he says, then gestures for Luke to sit. “I’m Bodhi,” he says.

Luke takes the lawn chair across from him. “Luke Skywalker, I met Cassian in my historiography seminar.”

Bodhi takes a long drag on his cigarette, his lips pursing and Luke tries to remind himself that it was years of exposure to tobacco product placement in films trying to make him think it looked cool and sexy, not actually this guy looking entirely too cool and sexy. “Cassian’s adopting liberal arts strays again?”

“What do you mean?”

“You do know Cassian’s in the geology department, right?”

Luke frowns, his eyebrows scrunching together.  "So what was he doing—?“

Bodhi shakes his head, chuckling. "Sometimes it’s better not to ask. You’ll figure that out quickly enough.”

Luke ducks his head and laughs. “I guess so.” After a moment he despondently realizes that he left his cup inside, but Bodhi’s reaching under his chair and pulling out another jelly glass. “What do you study?” he asks as Bodhi fills it with what might be vodka or maybe tequila.

“I’m a post-doc in applied mathematics,” says Bodhi, handing Luke the glass and raising his own. “Cheers.”

The liquid is tequila and Luke should be alarmed at how smoothly it goes down. “Wow, that’s some hard science you’ve got there,” says Luke with a hint of rasp to his voice.

“Hard  _science_ , huh,” repeats Bodhi, more than a hint of amusement in his voice. “You’re allowed not to like it, you know,” he says, taking another long swallow of tequila, which Luke isn’t going to complain about because it displays the column of Bodhi’s throat in a way that he’s more than a little interested in seeing again.

Still, he does have to stand up for himself a bit, and whatever kind of tequila this is, it doesn’t bite like the swill Luke’s used to. He takes a slightly shorter drink before saying, “Tastes just fine, but if you’ve been drinking this like that all night, I say you’re in that chair because you can’t stand any longer.”

Really, flaring nostrils trailing smoke like a dragon shouldn’t be possible much less this attractive but somehow Bodhi manages it. Stubbing his cigarette out in an empty coffee can, Bodhi rises to his feet smoothly. “This old drunk isn’t just standing, but about to kick your ass at bocce.”

Luke stands up and is slightly surprised to see they’re the same height: Bodhi had seemed longer when he’d been slouched in the chair. “You’re on, old man. Liberal arts students have nothing to do but play lawn games, don’t you know?”

“Bocce’s all about geometry, don’t you know, history boy,” says Bodhi, walking about the lawn and kicking the balls towards the better lit areas.  Luke spots the pellina by the fence and bends over to pick it up, the world only spinning a little bit as he does so. Fuck, he’s a little more drunk than he thought.

“Bocce’s all about instincts,” he says, walking up to where Bodhi’s gathered the other balls, pulling another cigarette out of the pack with his lips.

Luke watches Bodhi lick his thumb, thinking this must all be a distraction tactic, but it turns out that he’s testing the air to shift downwind before he lights the smoke. “You gonna toss that or not?” he says around the cigarette and really, it’s unhealthy and shouldn’t be sexy at all.

“Yeah, right,” he says, catching himself staring again, and lofts the pellina across the yard. “So what’s with calling this place Casa Roja?” he asks as Bodhi makes his first, frightfully accurate throw.

Bodhi points at the roof, which is indeed brightly painted red tin. “Thought it was obvious, but maybe you missed it for all the stars,” he says as Luke manages to not only plant his first ball closer, but knock Bodhi’s out of contention.

Luke grins at him and takes another sip of tequila. “Fair enough, but the stars are so pretty.”

“Too much light pollution around here,” says Bodhi as he in turn manages to roll right against the pellina.

Luke sighs. “So what do you do in applied mathematics?” he asks, scowling as his last throw goes too far.

Bodhi actually pumps his fist in the air before grinning at Luke. “Math, mostly.”

“Har, har,” says Luke as they cross the yard and Bodhi is sauntering rather close to him, his elbow brushing against Luke’s in what must be a distraction tactic, Luke’s not really this lucky.

“Well if you asked my peers, they’d tell you my job is crashing the supercomputer,” says Bodhi, making the next pellina throw.

Luke actually does laugh at that. “How do you crash a supercomputer?”

“Lots and lots of code. My code’s going to take us to those stars, I’ll have you know, once I finally manage to compile that shit,” says Bodhi, sparing a glance upwards as Luke lands a fantastic roll. “And what patch of history do you call your own?”

“Uhh… Mughal India, actually,” says Luke, hoping that this won’t turn into an awkward discussion of colonialism. It’s not his history, but he gets a feeling that it might be Bodhi’s.

Bodhi surprises him by actually looking flattered. “Really?” He grinds his cigarette out under his heel. “How’s your Urdu?”

“Passable for reading, not so much for speaking.” Luke wins the point and celebrates with a very long drink. “How’s yours?” he asks before clapping his hands over his mouth in embarrassment.

“Non-existent. Born in London, raised there and in LA, my parents always wanted me to learn but my mind’s always been a bit too full of algorithms for much else,” says Bodhi. He gets a very soft look on his face when he notices Luke’s distress and reaches up to rest a hand on Luke’s shoulder— his hand feels very warm and kind of nice. “It’s all right, I brought it up, if I’d asked about Hindi, you’d have asked me about Hindi, it’s just how conversation works for people not in the fucking liberal arts.”

“No it’s not, it’s a hideous fucking racist presumption, god, I can’t believe I just did that to you— I’m so sorry,” mumbles Luke, burying his head in his hands.

“Luke,” says Bodhi, his hand curling up to stroke the back of Luke’s neck in an incredibly soothing way. Luke lowers his hands and Bodhi’s grinning at him. “You’re drunk. We’re both drunk. Let’s not get emotional about this, let’s play some bocce and then find someplace to make out where we can’t hear the accordions and Cassian can’t take pictures.”

Luke feels his eyes bulge out. “You mean that?”

Bodhi’s grin turns positively wolfish as he leans forward and kisses Luke lightly, his lips tasting like cigarettes and tequila. “Absolutely,” he says. “Once I finish kicking your ass at bocce, that is.”  
  
Luke wins. Bodhi doesn’t seem to mind.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For @attackedastoria, “I need more college AU drunken makeouts.” It sort of fits, but mostly it’s about competition.

Luke will never forget the fateful Saturday, after his fifth straight croquet victory over Bodhi that week, when Bodhi snarls, downs the last of what Luke thought had been a new-ish beer in one go, and storms into Casa Roja. “It’s just a game, Bodhi,” he says, interrupting his victory shimmy which is the one part of consistently losing to Luke in lawn sports that Bodhi seems to actually enjoy, other than the makeout sessions afterwards. Luke has been looking forward to that makeout session, dammit, he should have given Bodhi one dignity win or something.

“I know it is, and now we are going to play  _Trivial Pursuit_ ,” Bodhi hollers back at him. Luke hasn’t heard anyone say the name of a board game with quite as much malice since Leia discovered him cheating at Monopoly when they were seven. The memory actually still sends chills down his spine— they’d had to go to the doctor’s office to get the thimble out of his ear and Leia hasn’t played a board game with him since. Still, he thinks as he follows Bodhi back into the house, he’s a liberal arts guy, the  _trivium_  is what his entire life’s work is based on, so this seems like an odd route of revenge for Bodhi.

Until he gets inside and finds Bodhi knocking on Jyn and Cassian’s bedroom door. “You hid the box again, where is it?”

From the other side of the door, Jyn shouts, “He’s just a child, you shouldn’t do this to him, it isn’t right.”

“It’s my game, I own it,” says Bodhi, his voice slightly less shouty but still definitely agitated, which Luke probably should find less attractive and be more concerned about the fact that he seems to have pushed his boyfriend over the deep end via lawn games.

“That’s why we don’t let you play, you always own it.”

“Jyn, he’s as good at croquet as he was at bocce and badminton, I  _need_  this.”

The door creaks open and Jyn’s head pokes through. Luke may have performed his victory shimmy for her once or twice as well, which judging by the look on her face she didn’t appreciate nearly as much as Bodhi; then again, she didn’t get the makeout sessions afterwards. “Is that so?” She presses her lips together. “Fine, but you know the rules.”

Bodhi takes her head in his hands and kisses the top of it. “Thank you.”

“Just be glad Kay’s out in the field, you’re lucky I even rescued this thing after last time.”

“I’ll get the vodka,” says Bodhi before turning to Luke and giving him a look that Luke’s only ever seen in their bedrooms or when Bodhi’s had a breakthrough on a problem at the lab, the one that still gives Luke weak knees and impostor-syndrome every time he sees it. Because yeah, Luke knows he’s a pretty smart, reasonably handsome guy, but his boyfriend has moments where he seems to transcend his own humanity and it’s really not fair at all, or at least it wouldn’t be if Bodhi wasn’t so generous in his affections and making it very clear how much he loved Luke. And also, sometimes looks at Luke like he’s about to eat him alive. Like right now.

In a few minutes Bodhi is sitting in the middle of the room, opening a slightly singed box and readying the board as Cassian starts dragging out what looks like most of Casa Roja’s extensive liquor cabinet. “Do I want to know what happened to the box?” asks Luke.

“Kay doesn’t like losing,” says Bodhi with a grin, only setting out two pies in the middle of the board. “I’m green, you’re blue.”

“Well what about Jyn and Cassian?”

Jyn lays a hand on Luke’s. “No, you don’t get it. House Rules state that whenever we play Trivial Pursuit, it’s Bodhi versus the house.”

Luke frowns. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

Cassian chuckles, giving him a knowing look that Luke knows better than to trust. “It isn’t.”

Luke shakes his head. “It can’t be that bad. You guys are all in the sciences, it’s gonna be different with someone from the liberal arts around.”

Except it’s not. Other house rules that Luke learns as the game progresses state that Bodhi has to drink a shot every time anyone wins a pie piece, that he has to answer two questions correctly for every pie piece while the house only needs to answer one, that the other team gets another question for the pie piece if Bodhi has to look at the back of the card to provide the correct answer and he  _still_  wins six to three. “Well, that’s one more than we usually get,” says Cass while Bodhi does his own version of the victory shimmy, except that’s not the reason why Luke’s mouth is slightly ajar.

“You’ve memorized the cards haven’t you?” he says, because it’s the only possible explanation.

“He can’t, we hold this shit hostage when we’re not playing,” says Jyn.

“You’re some kind of a savant then.”

“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” says Bodhi, dropping back down to his knees to push Luke into a long kiss. It is, somehow, even better than the makeout sessions after Luke’s victories. “Let’s play again.”


End file.
